CDB wrote:I'm looking to spend a fair amount of money to put together a home theater system.
It depends on what you mean by "fair". The prices for many of the so-called high-end loudspeakers I've seen are about as unfair as it gets.
Keep it simple.
Dr. Sloan's advice is first-rate, as usual.
I'm using mid-80's Linn Index+ loudspeakers, of the two-cubic-foot British variety. They are acoustic suspension speakers with an 8" bass driver and a soft-dome tweeter. They are equally good for music or movies, when used as front speakers for the latter. The Linns haven't been available for years, but I still prefer acoustic-suspension or very tight ported speakers (harder to find) with soft-dome tweeters. I expect similar speakers would cost around a thousand a pair or a bit more.
Whether you need a center-channel speaker depends on your speaker placement. My front speakers are about 7 feet apart and I've never had any sense that voices were not connected to mouths. Ken is absolutely right on the mark that the center speaker needs to have the same tonal characteristics as the front speakers--if they don't it's probably better to do without (I took a center speaker back when I found the sound was better without it for my setup). I have a pair of Polk Audio bookshelf speakers for the surround speakers, and they work fine. Rear speakers (which are the difference between a 5.1 and a 7.1 system) are the least important in that most DVD's don't even use them. The most important thing is to set up the surround speakers properly, which in my opinion means get an amp with a calibrated microphone and automatic setup. The set up requires proper loudness, equalization, and time delay for each channel so they will not attract attention to themselves.
My amplifier is an Onkyo, and even without a sub-woofer will cause my wife to complain from the other end of the house. The sound it produces is clean, with good supporting power (vastly better than the Sony it replaced, though the Sony was supposedly more powerful), and a calibrated microphone automatic setup. You could do much worse for $500.
If you want the vibrational effects, buy a real sub-woofer (not merely a "bass box"). It takes watts, watts, and more watts to create that much air displacement. I don't have one because my wife and pets won't tolerate it.
My whole setup cost about $2000. To me, that's a fair amount of money. Doing better would require spending more, which should be a goal no matter how much you spend. It is a more difficult goal to reach than you think, and it requires good balance between all the parts.
Movies have different requirements than music, as Ken rightly suggests. At 85 watts into each of 7 channels (four of which are being used), my theater setup will render movies ear-splitting. But it is not powerful enough to make orchestral music sound
real into stereo speakers, which is what I want so I can play excerpts as if I was sitting in the orchestra (wife not home, of course).
To achieve that sort of musical reproduction, I will always prefer a very tight acoustic suspension speaker, well damped, with a
BIG amplifier. My amp is a 250-watt Samson PA amplifier into a pair of 1978 Advent Loudspeakers. Those soft-dome tweeters are so smooth with none of the crispy-fried brittleness of ribbon tweeters in my ears. And amplifier quality can be guessed at using a bathroom scale (both the Samson and the Onkyo are heavy monsters).
But none of that matters compared to this: You will NEVER create a true movie-theater experience, because the room isn't movie-theater size. It will be loud, dynamic, and exciting, but fundamentally different than long-throw bass reflex theater speakers driven by a 300-watt bridged Crown amplifier in a room 100 feet long, or the like. Just as with playing the tuba in a small room, the low frequences will not be able to resonate.
Rick "old-fashioned" Denney
The imaging is far beyond anoything else in its class, and you'll have to spend more than $5000/pr for anything that comes close. Two properly-powered Vandersteens will create a theater environment. The 2Ce's are currently $1549/pr (and a Consumer's Digest Best Buy). If you want to go all-out, check out their home theatre set up, which currently runs about $3500. Plan on spending another $2000-3000 to power it up. Threshold Amps work extremely well with the Vandersteen. You'll swear you were "in the hall."
